[R-sig-ME] family with Julian dates

[Douglas Bates]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Iker Vaquero Alba <karraspito at yahoo.es> wrote:

>    Dear list members:>
>    I am fitting a model with lmer where the response variable is the laying date of several swallow pairs, measured as Julian dates (absolute number of days of the year elapsed, where 1st Jan is 1).

>    I was wondering wether I should use family=gaussian or poisson when writing the model, as I am not sure wether this Julian dates can be considered as count or continuous data.

>    What family would you reccommend me to use, and how can I test the suitability of each of them?

Definitely not Poisson.  I would suggest a Gaussian family.